I wouldn't deny you have a point about that.
It's not particularly meaningful to talk about deaths in absolute numbers either. But that's the media for you. They like their milestones and dramatic-headlines, but it's actually a completely arbitrary kind of "milestone". If the EU were a single country it wouldn't be true at all. I think the justification, such as it is, is the implication that the US is getting rapidly worse, so this is a marker point on the way to a real disaster. Edit - in that respect it's not quite the same as testing figures, unless the suggestion is that the US is going to pass everyone else even in per-capita figures.
Now the UK, on the other hand, seems to genuinely be doing very badly, because our government is every bit as useless as the Trump administration. We will probably take the number two spot in absolute terms before very long.
Edit2 - the UK is probably already ahead of France in absolute terms, and has similar population, because France is counting care-home deaths and we aren't. Johnson's government seems quite shambolic to me. There seems to be very little foresight or planning at the national level in either the UK or the US, the only difference being the US at least has something going on at the state level.